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Hey commonground, you should try the Gimp, a free alternative to photoshop. I hear Paint.net is good as well, but I've never tried it.

And remember, even though MSPain is clumsy and a rather useless bitmap editor (although some people can make good art in MSPain, look at spooks by Ivy, all art, bg's and animations were done in MSPain), you need to have some inkling of artistic talent, or at least a cheat for making decent looking scenes, like Crowshaw used in Trilby's notes.

And if you need help, ask for it. Post your wip's in this forum and let the crew give you pointers and suggestions. The tutorial thread in this forum has some great.. uh... tutorials.

Happy Backgrounding.

In the meantime, your host is responsible for loss of earnings. You should change hosting and take them to court for loss of earnings.

Well at least investigate that idea.

I'm not a lawyer, but they should be liable... somehow.

I've never seen plane food look that unappetizing.

I like the fact that he whinges about it in his letter in a very sarcastic and funny way. Only a Brit could do that. If an american had food like this they would yell in their obnoxious voices, " Hey what the hell is this shit? I'm gunna sue you." Then throw the so-called meal at the flight attendant.

Personally, if I was so upset at my so-called food, I would have called over the flight attendant, and said, "Um, excuse me, this food does not seem to be fit for human consumption." And get it changed. Silly man for not complaining on the spot.

The whole of the internet was infected by a virus. Shut down your computers and go outside. It's a place where download times are instant, graphics resolution is like millions x millions of pixels and framerate never shudders.

Don't forget the last 'non-ags' guest we had almost killed scotch in the icy french canal.

Cj's porn collection is a whole bunch of pictures of AGA naked? Eww.

Ok, a few questions.

Do they have a joint mortgage?

I'm guessing it's joint ownership, correct?

Unfortunatly, you need both people to sign to sell the house if it is joint ownership. If she is still on the mortgage, that is a baaaaad thing. Essentially she is paying for a house she doesn't live in and get's nothing out of.

Also, with the tumble of house prices in the UK, she may be owed less than the £10,000.

Is the £10,000 the deposit she contibuted?

I might have to phone a friend.

edit

AFAIK, you could take him to the county court and force a sale of the property, I think to file a claim in the UK is relatively inexpensive in the County Courts, and may be well worth it. It might just give him a shock.

Another q... does he live in the house? Sheffield and Stoke on Trent aren't that far away really.

And Dave, a lot of people would buy half a house, if not to live in, but just invest.

The whole joint ownership, break up thing is always going to be messy.

Lots of thoughts going through my head. Go see him, go to the bank with him and sort the whole thing out. But since you are in america, that would be difficult.

I dunno really. Just send him a claim letter from a solicitors for £10,000 + costs) :p

I am still going to have to be on the wouldn't miss it for the world, but will have to actually confirm when I can confirm I can afford the flights and everything.

I am looking forward to being a jerk to Pete and call her names.

And lets not forget, seeing my old friends Simon and Seamus again. Aye to be sure I miss them.

Not necessarily. It depends on what you want out of your art, and the look you are going for. One style of art is not necessarily better than another style. Just different. We all make choices. Line art can be smooth, you've just got to know how to get away with it.

You would get even smoother lines if you used vectors and later convert them to raster.

Alternatively, if you scan in greyscale, adjust the brightness and contrast, you should get pretty crisp lines. I usually use this method, as I tend to pixel over hand drawn art.

Even better would be to use method two, import into Adobe Illustrator and convert bitmap to vector. This will give you that smooth vector effect with little effort.

To colour, there are a few choices for hi-res art. You could use the magic wand, increase the size of the selection by a few pixels so the edges of your selection are in the middle of your outlines, create a new layer, set to the layer to multiply and fill. Another option here would be to use LAYER MASKS. They are frigging great. You basically have to create a new layer, have a selection and click the Create Mask in the layers panel in photoshop. Make sure you change the layer selection to the main image and not the mask, and draw away. Anything you draw in this layer will be confined to the mask area. Anything you draw outside of the mask will be invisible, or Masked. Thats why they call it a mask. Easy?



If you want use the same mask for another layer, that is pretty easy as well. You can use the magic wand tool on the mask of the layer. (Select the mask layer, click the magic wand within the visible area) If you create a new layer, it should automatically create a layer mask for you (not totally sure about this) but if not, you just need to click the layer mask button again, and voila! New mask. This is handy if you want to create a shadow mask for a layer.

Pt 2. Shadows in 6 easy steps.

Create a new layer.

Set to darken or burn or whatever looks best at the end. Create a new selection of the part of the image you DON'T want to be in shadow. Your selection doesn't have to be that smooth, but it helps a little.

Go to select menu and choose invert selection.

Fill with a very dark bluey-grey colour. Remember nothing is completely black. Not even black.

Gaussian Blur. Set it quite high so you get a smooth looking transition.

Set the layer opacity to maybe 30%.

Voila! Shadows that look pretty nice and smooth with little to no effort. I will try and get some pictures up later to illustrate, if my instructions aren't clear to you.

Remeber you can layer shadows, so for example in the smut hut interior, you could use a shadow layer here. To get a smooth join of a shadow, it's only a matter of painting it in black. You may have to blend using the old blur and smudge tool, but try to avoid it, as it can look messy if not done right.

If you are using other programs like psp or gimp, i'm sure there are ways of doing what I have said. If you are using paint. Get the Gimp!

Getting a key from the other side of a locked door by using a small stick and a piece of paper. Way too obvious.

It seems that this is still considered quite clever outside of adventure gaming circles. I just saw it used in Neil Gaiman's recent novel 'The Graveyard Book' and groaned my way through the page or two of meticulous performance of the task.
I always wanted to make a locked door puzzle where the newspaper-pencil trick seemed the obvious solution but (of course) didn't work due to real-life obstacles such as, well, door sills. I mean, how big does the gap under a door have to be not only to fit an old-fashioned key but sometimes also a bloody newspaper like in 'Post Mortem'?

You obviously have neglected to watch the Ben Jordan Film, where this puzzle is recreated, in all its glory.

Perhaps it's just because it's a very odd set of controls that people are not used to. There is no use getting so worked up about it, people just have opinions.

I had my opinion, that it was an odd choice to use that set of controls. I never said it was incorrect. It was an opinion.

You say it takes 5 seconds (I beg to differ, I kept accidently right clicking over the inv out of habit) fair enough, some people don't see it that way.

Which is why people are people. They all have opinions. I never claimed I was right and everyone else was wrong. I voiced my opinions on what I thought about the game and the inventory.

The reason (in my opinion) that people are bothered (me included) is that the GUI seems to overcomplicate the game.

You all seem to be reacting in a rather hostile way about constructive criticism. That is all I am going to say on the matter, since it seems irrelevant to raise any more points about this game.

You should try and tidy up the fuzzy outlines really.

Brilliant. All I got to say really. Well I could really expand on that.

Lovely spritework. Lovely story. Lovely all round really. Only thing it's missing is voices. :p But that's not a biggie.

Left click with item on background = use the item
Right click with item on background = deselect the item
Left click with item on the inventory = use the item
Right click with item on the inventory = deselect the item

Hmm, I might be able to do it this way, but as I recall some of my testers complained at not being able to quickly just pluck items from the inventory if they had one already, which is why I didn't go this route (it could also confuse players if they accidentally pick something up and wanted something else, since they would now have to click the right mouse button before being able to select another item).  If a majority of people would rather have slightly slower inventory access in favor of a more consistent control scheme I'll certainly consider it.

I would go as far to say with the inventory mouse click functions as they stand are actually a slower inventory access due to illogical button mapping. If I wanted to use an inventory item on an inventory item, I would click the current selected inventory cursor with my left mouse button on the inventory.

And no I'm not being a dick about things.

Just making an observation.

Why would you possibly need rapid inventory selection abilities? Did your testers forget to take their happy pills when they suggested the current in-game inventory panel mouse button mapping? I mean seriously who chooses chaos over logic?

Nice. Very nice. Sprites are a bit 'cutesey' for my tastes, but then again I always had a taste for blood.

It was my crowning glory!

That tool looks mighty fine.

Don't friggin tease me with something that looks so friggin awesome and not link me to further information on said tool!!!

Tell me more!

//edit

Ok, so I found it a minute later.

http://www.iconico.com/protractor/

I wish I had sweet sweet money to splash out on a mighty fine tool like this.

There is a feature in AGS called 'Make my Game'. Why don't you use that?

And Graham still looks unnaturally red.